The Witcher 3: New Details to Blow Your Mind

Ask anyone what games they’re looking forward to the most in 2014, and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt will probably be on that list. Developer CD Projekt RED’s latest open-world action RPG was extremely well received at E3 2013, winning over 55 awards, and has since then been referred to as a true next-gen experience to look forward to.

We caught up with Marcin Iwinski, co-founder of the CD Projekt group, to talk about its ambitious project, dealing with worldwide accolades, game mechanics, and lots more.

Can newcomers dive straight into The Witcher 3 or will they be lost in the game?

People do not need to play The Witcher 1 or 2 before they jump into Wild Hunt; it's perfectly fine. The game has a great introduction that will make them feel right at home, and we're working really hard to communicate this fact.

Each game has had its own story, but if you've played through both the games, or have even read Andrzej Sapkowski’s books, you'll be privy to a lot of stuff others may not get. That being said, the story is still very capable of standing on its own.

Good to know. On PC, will my older save games grant me some sort of bonus content or will my previous choices affect the game world in any way?

I cannot confirm this yet, but we're definitely looking at it on the PC side. We don't want to disappoint our PC fan base as we know mechanics like this are very important to them.

Any plans of releasing a graphic novel to bridge the gap between games for newcomers?

We've already announced a deal with Dark Horse comics in the US, and we'll be releasing a bunch of comics in a few months, so keep an eye out for that. Besides the comic books, we'll also be releasing a Witcher-themed board game that's designed by us and developed by Fantasy Flight Games. There's also a digital version of the board game planned for iOS and Android.

Wild Hunt is supposed to be 30 times the size of the older Witcher games. Is it extremely challenging to make such a vast game world and populate it with content that is capable of retaining gamers’ interest for hours on end?

(Laughs). Well, it is a challenge to develop games, let alone large open-world games like The Wild Hunt. In terms of the development itself, we have a team working on the game as well as on the engine powering the game. We have a bigger quest team and design team, and they spend a lot of time populating the world with significant content, that by the way is all tailor-made.

In The Witcher 3 you won’t have generic Fed Ex-like quests where you have to go here, fetch something, and then deliver it to someone else. Of course, you will have orders or side-quests to kill beasts, but we're trying to put a unique spin on every single quest. We want to make the story meaningful, but at the same time, if you wish you explore the game world at your own pace, it will be possible to do so. We want the game to feel natural, and we want players to be able to discuss their unique adventures with their friends.

How long will one playthrough of the game last, with and without side quests?

We're looking at roughly 50 hours for the main storyline depending on your gameplay style and the difficulty level. If you do most or all of the side quests, you're looking at anything between 100 to 120 hours of gameplay.

There were a lot of erratic difficulty spikes in The Witcher 2. Will The Witcher 3 have an easier learning curve?

(Snickers) We call this the Eastern European immersion curve, where we throw players straight into the deep end. On a more serious note, while I was going through some of the reviews, I read that certain Western journalists died multiple times in the prologue itself, and that wasn’t a good thing. We don't have the ambition to be a Demon's Souls. We're definitely working on the immersion curve, balancing the game to make sure people get well-introduced to the game world and its mechanics without any controller-breaking scenarios. If you don't want this game to be hard, it won't be. However, if you want a challenge, you can knock yourself out with the hardcore mode. With The Witcher 3, you should have the experience you want. Obviously, our core audience is the RPG gamer, but we're looking to expand that demographic with gamers who just want to follow the main story, and have a satisfying hack-and-slash experience.

So like any other medieval action game then?

I don't want to use the term ‘action game’, because The Witcher 3 is still very heavy on the RPG elements, but we would like to give our players the feeling that there is more to this game than creating alchemy potions or sorting through your inventory.